Touchdown

In these trying times, I take joy where I find it, and I found many kinds of joy in reading a brilliant article about Bad Bunny's Espectáculo de Medio Tiempo del Súper Tazón (= Superbowl halftime show) as a many-level religious ritual. Super illuminating, it's also by one of our alums!

We often think of ritual as an acting-out of or reinforcement of belief, but Bad Bunny’s performance shows us in real time that ritual can also be a tool to create change and shift or expand belief. His ritual intends, in no uncertain terms, to help viewers shift and expand their understandings of who and what Americans can be. 

Caught in the act

Today marked the one-year anniversary of the Multifaith Mondays prayer vigils at Columbus Circle. I haven't been able to attend that many (especially last semester, when I was teaching Monday evenings), but I go when I can. It's never been that big in numbers but is inspiring in many ways, not least through its persistence, through dark and cold. 

We had a good turnout today, and someone posed the several dozen of us for a picture (the way they did regularly the first months). But when I tried to find if someone had posted a picture online I found this picture from last month instead. I assure you there were more than four of us there that day, if not that many more... 

American exceptionalism

This from the latest Pew report saddens me.

I know there are all kinds of apples and oranges being compared here (what comes to mind as the goodness or badness of a fellow citizen?), but that's presumably the case in all the countries sampled, not just in the U. S., the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens bad. 

The surveys were conducted in March and April of last year, which might help explain the American anomaly a little. In general, those politically out of power are apparentlu more likely to distrust their fellow citizens.

[In the U S.] Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%). And previous research has shown that rising numbers of both Republicans and Democrats say people in the other party are immoral.

Isn't the United States supposed to be a leader in trust and respect for your fellow citizens? I think I might have answered "somewhat good" if asked this question, even if the reelection of DT had been top of mind. Some confidence in the intentions of your fellow citizens seems to me a precondition for living in a democracy. Part of why this saddens me so...

Death dealers

I've read in the annals of dictatorship about how leaders with unbridled power develop a taste for death. This bloodlust is on horrifying display in the Secretary of War Crimes, not just in his rhetoric but in the appalling torpedoing of an unarmed Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, leaving survivors to drown - and sharing footage of the attack so others might be drawn into his sadistic orgasm. He's been salivating at delivering death at sea since the U. S. government started targeting smaller boats in the Caribbean last September. His sociopathic boss is indifferent to life or death but is developing an appetite for "decapitating" other leaders. They're murderers all of them.

CDMX

Can I make a confession? Most of this last week, while the United States proved itself an ever more monstrous threat to international peace, I was abroad. Ciudad de México, in fact: the friends I visited with last year are there again and had a vacancy in their guest room. So off we went! (I set off right after my Thursday morning lecture, returned the night before the next one.) A year ago, the horror unfolding in the US was just becoming clear. Now the mind balks at not just a year of steadily greater outrages but the grim reality that we have been unable to stop it. A highlight this time was the Museo Nacional de Historia in the Castillo de Chapultepec, an inspiring if sobering reminder that history is no walk in the park. At least Mexicans don't pretend otherwise.

 

 

Remedios Varo, "Roulotte (Carricoche)," 1955, Museo de Arte Moderno

Juan O'Gorman, "Retablo de la Independencia," 1961, Museo Nacional de Historia

Splitting

I noticed last week that the snow had taken down a branch of a callery pear tree near The New School. 

 

(Callery pears' v-forks make them particularly vulnerable to splitting like this, one reason they're no longer planted as much as they once were).  

Then, as I walked past it and found more limbs in the snow, I realized it wasn't just one but two branches the tree had lost. In fact: three! 

 

A week later, all the fallen branches, big and small, have been removed, along with the snow, leaving just the wounded tree torso.

War crime

He did it. Why? So many possible reasons being bruited by the pundits, none probably the actual reason, none offered to the people or our representatives, or the international community - and not one of these candidate reasons legitimate. (I'm remembering from my problem of evil days that the search for motives of evil usually reveals a disappointing void, the noble and profound casually destroyed by the shallow and mediocre.) The chaos president, emboldened by past crimes, rains catastrophe around the world. Ours is now a rogue state.

I know what I know, if you know what I mean

At an intimate workshop sharing the "Theorizing Religion" class activities around definitions of religion and the religions of unexpected things like capitalism, academia and fashion, I gave folks a few definitions of religion to chew over. Three were serious, the fourth not so much. 

If you don't recognize it, that last one is from the song which VH1 listed as No. 23 of the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80s," Edie Brickell's "What I am" - and was inspired by irritation at a college world religons class! (I used it once before, almost twenty years ago (!).) I told the assembled people I'd included the smile on a dog to keep things light-hearted but after a while noted that it was in the list also as a corrective to the potentially merely anthropological claims of the other three (Tillich, Suzuki, Durkheim). Religion might be a fact not just about human beings muddling along but about the solicitation of the more-than-human world in which we find ourselves.

The event was my contribution to a suite of events around the "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Dialogues" exhibition, and the conversation my prompts fostered among these fashion-focused students quickly left me behind: wearing something that "just feels wrong," the fate-like power of "trends," the rage for reusing other' clothing, the "transcendent" feeling when wearing and being recognized in the work of a famous designer who just died, the daily "ritual" of dressing, death... 

I guess that, contrary to my pious pedagogical protestations, "the religion of fashion" is to me really not (yet) more than a conceit... But the enthusiastic reception of this, along with all the other components of the exhibition, suggest I may have opportunity to learn more. Shouldn't we turn this into a team-taught course, the BFA Fashion colleague who'd had the transcendent experience wondered?

Cotton candy snow

Blizzard of 2026

After nineten inches of snow finished falling, NYC was a sight to see!

How it begins

First blizzard warning for NYC in nine years!

Repent

From the Great Litany, for the first Sunday of Lent... 

Delusions of grandeur

I'm partial to the AI versions of the banner where "justice" is replaced by "rapist" but the enabling of this cult of personality is beyond distressing.

Get the drift

Mostly people complain about the grimy rests of the past weeks' snows but it occurred to me that they're actually quite beautiful in their own way. Worthy of a Ross Gay "delight practice" gesture?!

马年快乐

This horse (from our Met daily calendar) looks a little overwhelmed. Lunar new year, Ramadan and Mardi Gras, all at once?

Out lines

More and less evanescent lines on the Kazimiroff Nature Trail

Intervention

In today's church bulletin, a copy of a public letter sent by the head of the Anglican Church in Canada to the head of the Episcopal Church. 

Our nation finds itself in a "time of distress," he writes, which is "heartbreaking for us, your northern neighbors, to watch." How good to be reminded that other hearts break with ours, see the blessing in our acts of loving resistance. How grateful I feel to read his call to Canadian Anglicans "to continue holding in prayer all of you in this intense, unpredictable season in the life of the United States of America."

Upcycling

Today we had a symposium featuring people whose work appears in the exhibition "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Conversations," including a panel for us members of the planning team. The symposium ranged widely, as the exhibition does, making a stimulating whole out of what had started as a grab-bag of piecemeal ideas and connections. We heard about young Muslim American influencers and their innovative takes on hijab, the vestments designed for the ordination of Episcopal bishops (including Gene Robinson), an erstwhile Tibetan Buddhist nun's art in body-hugging and inflatable latex, the extravagantly garbed figures of an invented religion called Abwoon Dominus...

Discussion ranged from testimonials to fashion designed by "people of faith" to a young religious studies scholar's insistence that "fashion is capitalism, religion is violence, that's just authentic!" A Japanese priest told us how, when he was doing monastic training, the robes made him feel he needed to get up at 5:30am rather than his preferred 2pm. An older Moroccan woman responded to the presentation of work on new stylish hijabs by reflecting that when she grew up, she envied the women in hijab their freedom not to have to do up their hair, etc.; these young women's freedom is being taken away! In indigenous designer challenged the fashion industry's obsession with "scaling up" but also the expectation that each designer set up their own shop - why not find someone already doing what you're interested in and joining them?

I'm sort of hoping this project continues. Not that this phase is finished yet - I'm offering a workshop called "Is fashion a religion" in ten days, assisted by students from "Theorizing Religion." I'll bring from today's discussions a renewed sense that standard understandings of dress in terms of "self-expression" and "being seen" may mischaracterize religious - but also putatively non-religious - forms of attire.

Anthrobscene

 

 

 

 

 

 

What wicked, wicked people these are

Question Mark Religion

Meanwhile, in "After Religion," I today tried to cover both the history and problems of the modern notion of religion (private, individual, focused in feeling, etc.) and the history and problems of the idea of world religions (incoherent category privileging Christianity-like imperial formations, etc.) - what I called, borrowing from Brent Nongbri, the idea of religion a genus and species. This folded together two lectures 

from last year's iteration, each a bit of a condensation of several sessions of "Theorizing Religion." Somewhat disturbingly, I think it made sense as a digest - even with the additional critique of the ideas of religion and world religions of American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria. I tried somewhat subliminally to communicate what I was doing through 

some fiddling with image on the agenda slides I use to structure and punctuate my lectures. A giant question mark composed of symbols of world religions (a piece of free clip art amusingly entitled Question Mark Religion) towered over the class as we began, then tilted to one side as we noticed the surprisingly modern pedigree of "religion." It   

lurched further - to an almost fishhook angle - as we dissected the faux pluralism of "world religions," before stabilizing into a kind of horizontal correction as we learned about Deloria's critique of time-based religions from the vantage of space-based ones. I hope it felt like a kind of calibration, arriving at an unexpected alternative coherence.

The reason for the compression of what had originally been three lectures near the center of the course into two nearer the start is to make space for some of the other things this moment seems to demand. Today's was the first of the pair "Challenging Religion" and "Challenging the Secular," and will be followed by a pair (expanded from one lecture) focusing on the multifaceted threat of religious nationalism.

Seguimos acqui

Bad Bunny at the Super Tazón made me so proud and grateful to be American - America understood as a whole hemisphere of course! I hope every time a white nationalist utters the pablum "God bless America" (not just at waspy "All-American" celebrations that embarrass by their narrowness) we will all feel the surge of God's love for all the Americas, pushing aside the theological absurdity of supposing any one part has a manifest destiny to dominate the others. Rhetorical touchdown, Benito!

Out of commission

A happy transition at church today - the "commissioning" of four new vestry members and a new warden. 

And it was fun to watch it from the side, rather than be part of it, as I have been for nine years: a three-year term on vestry, and then thrice two years as one of the church's two wardens. 

We've been through a lot in that time, from the calling of a new rector to the zoom-diaspora disruptions of the pandemic to a current capital campaign updating our physical plant, and it was nice to have a ring-side seat ... though really the wardens' place is inside the ring! At a diocesan wardens' conference and then again at last summer's CCD (College for Congregational Development), I learned that my ride has been unusually smooth. In demographically challenged or less well-run congregations, and without the kind of managerial support we are afforded by the professional staff of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, there's more and harder work for wardens to do. 

I had an earlier stint in the lay leadership, a term on vestry from 2010-13, as we went through an earlier clergy transition. Reading my reflections on the end of that chapter (thank you, blog!), I realize I've metabolized all the transitions we witnessed then, as, indeed, I've already metabolized those of this longer stint. 

At that point I reflected that successful change is made possible by the continuity in what isn't changing - space, community, liturgy, polity - whether those are better understood as inertia or momentum. I'd like to think my wardenship has contributed to steady momentum! (Space, community and liturgy have all shifted over these nine years, too.) As we confirmed at CCD, Holy Apostles is doing well as Episcopal congregations go, and the imminent completion of the rebuilt Mission House will open further new doors. 

In any case, I've done my time. Grateful others are there to take on the work. 

Windy